Are we not supposed to be able to solo?

Ever since the changes to mana for our dps abilities, I've been having a hard time keeping a reasonable amount of mana going for dailies. Also, the damage seems lower (I guess because I'm running out of mana faster).

However, this is my first healer, so I'm not sure what's "normal". Does everyone basically default to a dps spec for their secondary to get through quests?

Your healing gear is 462 ilvl, 5k spirit, and missing/outdated enchants, what did you expect? Of course dpsing as a healer spec is going to be less efficient than as a dps spec, and when your healing spec is fairly undergeared.... yeah.

Also really confused by your glyph choices. You should definitely be using Glyph of Mana Tea, and that would actually help with your issues.

Though I'd really suggest just using a dps spec if you have any agi gear.

I always use a dps spec to do dailies on my priest/druid but I don't have to have 2 gear sets to do that. If I wanted to do quests as holy in chastise chakra it wouldn't be that bad thanks to the 90% mana cost reduction and dmg buff to smite. Some healers have decent and cheap ways to deal damage, MWs don't.

I just finished leveling my monk to 90 yesterday. I had to buy vendor agi sets and go WW to do quests (85-90) at a reasonable pace. If I started doing dailies on it I don't see myself wanting to do them as a MW. Maybe in really amazing gear you'd be able to quest as fast as a WW in greens.

I lvld my monk before all the nerfs went out, so my gear was slightly better then yours when they did but I have had very few issues with mana when questing as MW. The only time is if i chain pull 10-12 mobs one after another.

I would think that Swaggle is right on with the idea that its your gear thats causing issues. Not so much your ilvl, your ilvl IS high enough to quest as MW and not have issues, the main issue im seeing is your gems and chants. Missing a number of enchants, reforged COMPLETELY wrong, you should have spirit in every gem slot you can (including the spirit meta... 3% crit effect is more useful then 2% mana imo)

Mastery and haste are both horribad at your ilvl. You can not reach 3145 haste on armory (the 2 tick point for RM) so you shouldn't be reforging into it. Mastery is just bad, you are barely geared for raiding and GotS doesn't get used by randoms in 5 mans (thus useless). Crit and spirit are the 2 stats you should be looking for, crit will improve your mana tea generation as well as your dps and spirit is obvious in its benefit.

There are a number of other points that I WANT to make, but they aren't exactly relevant to the current discussion so I'm not going to. (your talents and glyphs leave a little to be desired even if you ONLY intend on solo content)

It isn't just the throughput changes that make it more difficult now than it was, it's the "Greater separation of specializations" at play - when I lost Starfire and Thorns, I lost significant portions of my toolset - and what's left is the weaker portion and even that has been significantly neutered.

I also lost healing abilities when I'm Feral, but I didn't tend to rely on them heavily, as by the time I couldn't out-DPS whatever I'd tangled with, I sure couldn't out-heal the damage.

As a Resto Druip, you can solo much of what you can as a Feral - as long as there isn't a time limit. But why would you? You have to be careful not to overpull, and you need to be prepared to spend 3 - 4 minutes taking down a mob that you'd take down in 20 seconds or less as Feral. And Lord help you if they respawn quickly.

Well, I suppose the threshold for, "miserably slow," is very personal.

With the changes to leveling and questing since Vanilla and BC it is certainly easier to do things as a healer or tank than it was back in the day. Overgeared tanks in particular can compensate if they pull giant crowds of mobs.

It's chiefly if you compare to Wrath/Cata or with dps specs at present that solo combat in healing and tank specs looks somewhat unsatisfactory.

I still usually spec Tank/Heal on the classes that can, so I suppose in some sense I find it merely annoying instead of truly miserable.

The difference is quite noticeable though when I spec dps or do things on dps alts. Things suddenly take a fraction of the time they do as a healer or tank.

It's not likely to change though, because the design decisions that drove the changes were sound ones.

Tri-spec would be nice, but I suspect that a change of that size won't be made just for the sake of druids, paladins and monks, or rather the subset of those classes that prioritize tank and heal specs over dps specs.